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An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired: "In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It's part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using 'open source intelligence' — information that's publicly available... Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn't touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what's being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords. 'That's kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,' says company senior vice president Blake Cahill. Then Visible 'scores' each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. ('Trying to determine who really matters,' as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface."Apropos: Another anonymous reader points out an article making the point that users don't even realize how much private information they're sharing over these services.

Just copying the Brits. They've been referring to many kinds of government spending as "investment" for years now - even chunks of the welfare system. The debasement of the English language proceeds apace, on both sides of the Atlantic...

What troubles me about this is not the security applications, although there is risk there, too, but the political, persuasive abuse. Innocent sites like Slashdot will be 'turfed' to move public opinion and public perception.

Many bloggers are starting to notice some new referrals from a company called “NetVocates” (mine showed up as coming from arrca.netvocates.com to be specific).

I recently invited a guest blogger (who writes under the pseudonym D. Sirmize) to share his political opinions on my blog. I began to get hits (55 to date) from NetVocates a couple days after his first political post. It woul

Yes, I know that organizations are 'astroturfing'. That is why I used the term 'turf'. That's been going on for quite some time.

What's new and different is governmental use of automated tools. Would it not be fair to assume that secret government agencies, already enjoying unconstitutional immunity, would use these tools to effectively destroy groups who, for example, seek to put limits on the powers of secret government agencies?

And would it not be smart to assume that these tools will be used by pol

"The PRESIDENT has the RED NUCLEAR MAILBOMB and an RPG, so he's going to meet with the SMALL POX CRYPTO INFILTRATION team and the SUBVERSIVES from WHITE YANKEE, then ASSASINATE the SECRET SERVICE CLAYMORE MUNITIONS after lunch."

To buy into companies that allow them to circumnavigate Constitutional provisions against spying on American citizens.

For example, the second one, the CIA loves companies like this one [choicepoint.com] and the credit bureaus because they can legally collect information on private citizens. Then the CIA "buys" the information from them and they can go to Congress and say, "Nope! We are NOT spying on Americans." - at least that's the answer to the Congressmen that aren't afraid to appear to be "weak on terrorism" or afraid to be lambasted by ignorant talk show hosts.

So my follow-on question is, Why does everyone think it's OK for private companies answerable to no one (or the highest bidder) to be collecting this information in the first place? Well, yes, I suppose most people in this thread don't think so, but all of the normal people out there seem to be perfectly happy with the idea.

So my follow-on question is, Why does everyone think it's OK for private companies answerable to no one (or the highest bidder) to be collecting this information in the first place? Well, yes, I suppose most people in this thread don't think so, but all of the normal people out there seem to be perfectly happy with the idea.

Because they don't view the Bill of Rights as sound and enlightened principles to be honored wherever possible that happened to be enshrined in the Constitution. They view them as rules like any other. Then they note that either the rules don't apply to those private companies or they would be difficult to enforce, and for them, that's that. It's a mentality that is all about what is allowed or what can be gotten away with, rather than what is right or wrong.

I do have a more immediate question. If an average citizen hires a person to do something illegal, both the person and the one he hired can be charged with a crime. If it's illegal for the CIA to gather data on American citizens, why is it suddenly legal when they do the same thing by proxy? Why wouldn't both they and the company they hired be prosecuted for this?

People go along with the program because they enjoy the "benefits" provided by the program. In the case of organizations like ChoicePoint and the credit bureaus, people like having access to credit. People like being able to spend money that they don't have. Just look at Congress and the rest of America. I read something the other day that said the debt load of America is over 100% (it was around 120%, down from 130%+ a few years ago).

[Now, the issue of whether it's illegal from the CIA to use the information because of the -CIA's- restrictions on domestic spying is another issue, though I could theorize that using publicly available information is not spying... but certainly that's debateable.]

I have an idea. Hopefully we can agree that when the CIA looks at your social network pages, they can correlate information and find facts and draw conclusions that would never occur to the average citizen who visits your page. Why not regard t

And if you posted 'private' information on the public internet, guess what, it's no longer private, so no complaining about it's use

FWIW, don't complain when information you posted "anonymously" is identified with you in the not so distant future:-

Even if the websites were unwilling to share account info with each other, I suspect that one could write a screen-scraper for information and posts on the most popular sites, and group all the public info associated with a particular account anyway- which is probably enough.

FWIW, this wasn't the first time I'd posted that, I spotted the danger some time before, as would anyone who'd even heard of 'data mining' have done if they'd applied even a small amount of thought to the issue.

I think Zack De La Rocha, The Last Emperor & KRS-ONE said it best in their track "CIA""Need I say the C.I.A. be criminals in action"

But given that the same song said that "President Clinton should delete them", I guess it wasn't as popular as it could have been:) and sadly, since 9/11 they are actually percieved to have a job again. A front job is always a very good thing for a criminal. Nothing like an air of legitimacy to hide criminal minds.

But given that the same song said that "President Clinton should delete them", I guess it wasn't as popular as it could have been:) and sadly, since 9/11 they are actually percieved to have a job again.

Strange. Kennedy fired Dulles & his Number Two, then wrote a couple executive orders breaking the CIA into a thousand pieces to be swallowed up by the various military intelligence services. His body was still cooling off when LBJ rescinded those orders and ended up starting the Vietnam War.

What you don't understand is that part of the CIA has ALWAYS had an investment arm, even before the CIA and OSS existed. The CIA was born out of the private intelligence networks already well established by Wall Street, hence why so many of the early CIA was filled and run by Ivy League schools and Yale's Skull and Bones crowd.

The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies".

Since 1947 the CIA and other intelligence activities have been more and more privatized. They have always used front companies. Search for the Northwoods Documents, which were authored in the late 1950's.

Many have argued that E.O 12333 privatized a lot of intelligence work. Read Confessions of an Economic Hitman if you want to know one reason why they do this.

To help fund off the books black ops projects, of course. Can't exactly go before the House Budget Committee and request multiple millions for bribe money to be used on foreign dictators, now, can you? And to provide plausible deniability, like 'Air America' back during the Vietnam days.

Investment vehicles like In-Q-Tel are not redundant with conventional venture capital and were created to fill some clear funding gaps in the existing technology venture markets.

First and foremost, they tend to invest in ventures with technologies that are sufficiently advanced or unusual that normal VCs will promptly ignore the venture. This came out of a realization that really advanced computer science and hardware technologies that the agencies needed

Because US intelligence agencies are probably 10 to 15 years behind in terms of their data gathering and data mining abilities.

Let me put it to you this way. Would a company like Google, with the amount of data it has and the way it uses it, have been allowed to exist during the cold war? Not a chance. At the very least, Google would have extremely close connections to the establishment and it would be far more likely that it would have found itself coral

Because in case your haven't noticed the U.S. government has turned in to a gigantic corporation, an extremely corrupt and incompetent corporation at that. There isn't anything resembling a government "of the people" in Washington any more and both parties are equally to blame. By any definition the U.S. has moved in to the realm of "state capitalism", and again both Democrats and Republicans are equally responsible, its been happening for a while but the last couple years it became a fait accompli as brea

that statement is neither necessarily true nor necessarily false - corporations and the government are bureaucracies. Sometimes one is better, sometimes the other is.

For example the National Weather Service kicks the living crap out of every private company trying to do the same thing. They pay well, the recruit the best and brightest, they are managed by professionals with experience doing what their underlings do [something you often only can DREAM of in the corporate world or the government world].

On the other hand there are some things private industry IS better at doing, and the government quite often contracts out to these people - construction comes to mind, software development, etc.

The government, when run by skilled people, tends to be much better at private industry than doing things that are "natural monopolies" (police, fire, roads, water, etc) or things the profit-motive would harm [like insurance].

Probably not a good example to use in illustrating your point. Dealing with Medicare billing is such a gigantic heartache that doctors' offices who do so, and they are a small minority, will have to hire at least one specialized clerk just for that purpose. In this sense, Medicare is shifting its overhead onto its customers. Wherea

As others have already pointed out, Medicare is a terrible example. When you compare overhead per patient served, private insurance beats Medicare handily. And with the profit motive removed there's relatively little incentive to reduce fraud, as reflected in the enormous amount of outright fraud and unnecessary work billed to Medicare.

Government is better at providing services that can't easily be charged to those who use them (CIA and military are good examples). As soon as it makes sense to directly

Sorry, but the total monies owed in benefits for Social Security and Medicaid/care combined, as of about three weeks ago, all unfunded, is/was 65 TRILLION DOLLARS (Source: GAO).

We are adding one to two TRILLION to this figure every year. And, per GAO circa June 2008, even if we confiscated everyone's income (100 percent of it) from here on out, we wouldn't even have enough money to may the interest on the money owed in benefits for these programs. The bank is broke, and we are just printing money (causi

Another example is the VA. consistently rated as one of the best medical institutions in the world.

The 'Government' does 10;s of thousands of project successfully every year. Sadly, the media only reports failures and perceived failure, and the government is open. Unlike private companies that don't need to disclose their failures.

Then Visible 'scores' each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. ('Trying to determine who really matters,' as Cahill puts it.)

Seems like a redundant effort. Why not just check the author's karma on slashdot?

Surely my high slashdot karma means I'm one of the most influential people on the internet... right? Right?

Yes, AC, but classifying you as 'positive', 'negative', or 'neutral' has baffled even our most proficient data mining experts here in Langley. That's why we had to contract out. One of my direct reports came to me the other day near tears:

"Sir, we just can't figure him out! One day he's writing insightful commentary with informative links correcting somebody who had made a simple mistake. The next day he was making harmless snarky jokes. And this morning he posted a long list of instructions on... On.

This is data that people freely post to be read by all anyway. All this seems to do is aggregate it. If you post it in a public forum, you shouldn't care who uses it or how. Unless the sites being scraped have policies against said scraping, who cares? I see it as a very valuable tool for sales departments.

Besides, I am sure the signal to noise ratio for this system is incredibly low, so one has to wonder how much usable information is retrieved.

The only problem I have with this is that my tax dollars are going to fund it.

Ok, lets look at this from another perspective: once a individual personalized profile is built, one can tell how you think and act - your pattern of behavior, if you will. Taken one step futher, (admittedly this is a hypothetical scenerio, but one we seem to be fast approaching)... government (local, state, federal - you choose) sanctioned "behavior and thought police".

Hmmm Joe Schmoe based upon his profile may be a threat / menace to society, lets "reeducate" him. Technology developed like this is bo

Reading publicly-posted comments is not a problem. At least, not to me. (I do know some thickies that are shocked, SHOCKED, that someone besides their BFFs can read their social networking crap.) Anyways, sure, public posting is public. Even lolcat knows that.

But agencies of state power reading, aggregating, correlating, and scoring... drawing secret conclusions based on hidden agendas and closed criteria... that's disturbing. Shades of J. Edgar Hoover's secret file cabinet and COINTELPRO and the basement o

This is data that people freely post to be read by all anyway. All this seems to do is aggregate it. If you post it in a public forum, you shouldn't care who uses it or how. Unless the sites being scraped have policies against said scraping, who cares? I see it as a very valuable tool for sales departments.

Besides, I am sure the signal to noise ratio for this system is incredibly low, so one has to wonder how much usable information is retrieved.

The only problem I have with this is that my tax dollars are going to fund it.

I'll explain that with a hypothetical analogy. There's nothing wrong with a person who can see your house from the public street. You knew it was a public road before you built a house near it, after all. However, you might find it a bit unsettling if the same van is always parked on that road and its occupant is always watching your house day and night. You might find it downright alarming if you noticed that he was videotaping your premises and taking notes about your daily activities. You might wond

The only problem I see with that analogy is that you are saying it is someone watching everything I do, and only me. While monitoring the blogs can lead to that, I would see this as a van that drives through my neighborhood everyday, taken pictures of the houses. While still a little unsettling, all they are really going to see is what I put out for them to see.

So surveillence is only bad when it's personal? I can't get behind that. There is no principle in it, there is only the consideration of whether

There are a TON of companies that are trying to datamine social media for a variety of reasons- I'm posting anonymously because I work for a company that makes one of these products.

What is interesting is companies that make consumer products all want these tools to be able to track the companies interaction with the consumer- these companies are specifically replying back to specific posters in order to stop the spread of what they call "misinformation", but in actuality is just anything where the company is painted in a bad light. Let me be clear: Corporate America wants to control everything that is said online, and the tools to do it are starting to show up. Companies are starting to employ people whose soul job is to look at social media and respond to negative comments.

I predict not far in the future there is going to be a push for owners of social media sites to have some control over who can index their content.

I like to use my blog to rant about unusable products and deceptive practices. Once I got a call from someone working for a large online retailer regarding a post where I labelled one of their practices as a "fraud". Technically it wasn't because the issue was not settled by a court (but another similar company was condemned for a very similar practice). He was very business-like but a bit pushy, so I googled his name. Turns out that he's basically in charge of responding to all the online criticism aimed a

I have thought a bit about control of information, not just corporate control.

Google is developing a firefox plug-in for adding additional information to established web sites by viewers. "Helpful comments". Well, that is google.

I seem to recall this was done in a less restricted way perhaps five years ago by someone, it went through some courts and was considered legal, basically because it was a user choice to install the plug-in. Probably got the story from slashdot.

Let me be clear: Corporate America wants to control everything that is said online, and the tools to do it are starting to show up. Companies are starting to employ people whose soul job is to look at social media and respond to negative comments.

You're right, they are responding to negative comments. In fact, I'm impressed with the responses I have received from my ISP (Charter) and SAS. I posted some pretty pissed off comments about Charter last week when my connection dropped (I have business class and I

You're right that most companies are using it to monitor customer satisfaction and do market research, not in any negative sense but to see how people honestly feel. However, the issue is one of bad apples - in the classical, correct sense of one bad apple spoiling the barrel, I should specify, not the dismissive "just a few bad apples."

Every time a company gets spotted promulgating fake reviews or comments, they're essentially poisoning the well. As clever as we are (or as clever as we think we are), there

I disagree. Those whom we would label terrorist are the least likely to label what they are doing terrorism. They likely consider it duty or calling. If you want to use generalizations, clichés and stereotypes they may view it as a jihad.

I imagine a post would go something like:

<Deity/> himself will lead them, for they will be doing His work. There will be absolution and remission of sins for all who die in the service of <Deity/>. Here they are poor and miserable sinners; there they will be rich and happy. Let none hesitate; they must march next summer. <Deity/> wills it!

[Deity/] himself will lead them, for they will be doing His work. There will be absolution and remission of sins for all who die in the service of [Deity/]. Here they are poor and miserable sinners; there they will be rich and happy. Let none hesitate; they must march next summer. [Deity/] wills it!

And for 100 extra points, which Catholic pope of the 1100s said that to whip up support for a Crusade? Fanaticism isn't restricted to Islam, you know...

Exactly right. If you're posting for the world to see, even if you're using an alias, you'd better be flying the straight and narrow and be cautious enough to avoid posting anything that would allow identity theft.

Still, this kind of intrusion infuriates me to the point that I'm going to log in to my Amazon account (cleverly disguised user name surfergrrrl123), buy a bunch of peroxide and acetone, build myself a heckuva bomb in the garage of 1313 Mockingbird Ln (an abandoned house - not my address - Ha - C

Yeah, well wait until you're sitting there building it and a guy who looks like Frankenstein's Monster shows up and throws a tantrum. You'll run away so fast it looks like a recording of you was sped up!

I believe these kinds of softwares, or others like them, will be able to fingerprint you by writing style alone. Alot of people make common grammatical mistakes or typos over and over. For instance, in the previous sentence and generally, i say "alot" instead of a lot. I also do not capitalize certain words. I am sure if you entered all of slashdot into some software programmes, you could very easily determine who my sock puppets are, purely based on writing style alone. Then of course there is the content,

You'd be shocked. There's still this attitude by lots of people that what happens on the internet stays on the internet. Our local probation department routinely violates people based on facebook photos of them:
-In places they've been tresspassed from
-Consuming alcohol (if it's a condition of probation)
-Pointing guns at each other
-Being around children (sex offenders)
-Driving (Habitual Traffic Offenders)

Of course, the photos could be old, or (theoretically) doctored. However, like any other evid

Mining peoples social networks is almost certainly extremely useful if you can find a person of interest. You can immediately identify their close associates.

I'm kind of doubting many serious terrorist or criminals actually use Twitter but I wager all the Iranians who used facebook and twitter to protest a rigged election immediately had their social networks scoured by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. If you are trying to unroll an underground network if you find people that put their social network onl

Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians.

It isn't "literally "the database"", is "the base", "the basis" or "the foundation". Maybe some CIA guy with a sense of humor morphed it in to "the database" but this looks like just a pretty flawed translation or fabrication.

From Wikipedia.... "The name comes from the Arabic noun q'idah, which means foundation or basis and can also refer to a military base. The initial al- is the Arabic definite article the, hence the base."

They're not, but do you think that's going to be a serious impediment to them doing so anyway? First off, they're going to be trying really hard to keep their intelligence gathering a secret, so you probably won't know that they're doing it in the first place. Secondly, even if you did find out about it, what are you going to do? Sue? They'll claim state-secrets privilege within a couple minutes of you filing your complaint. Now you can't do discovery, and there goes your case.

Point being, "allowed to" is a complete non-issue here. They're going to do what they want, when they want, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

A) this has nothing to do with domestic intelligence in general.B) Their are circumstance where it is allowedC) They do keep to their legal jurisdiction pretty well.D) Other agency's don't like it when soneone staps withing their legal bounds.E) People ahve sued the CIA successfully.

There are legal protection in place that are adhered tom pretty well.Homeland security was crated to get around those protections.That's the agency that needs to be shut down if you are concerned with rights.

The CIA isn't. Some private company is doing it:).If that's not good enough, I'm sure they can always make some vaguely legal request to the private company to ask another private company/organisation and so on to do the dirty work.

The benefits of outsourcing.

That's why I find it hilarious when the fanatics keep saying small government will be better than big government.

If you really think a small government that outsources all the dirty work to private corporations will be better, you're a fool.